


Tell My Family I Love Them

by Sanctuaria



Category: Black Widow (Movie 2020), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, I know right?, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Vignettes, basically what Natasha's last thoughts would be if her last thoughts were about her team, kill me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:54:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22624393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: The first time she met Tony Stark, he was an ass and she was eye candy. The CEO and the secretary. The man in power and the woman in a tight-fitting blouse. In a post-Anita Hill, post-Monica Lewinski, post-Spotlightsort of way, of course.The first time she met Steve Rogers, he was out cold, if standing over a man’s unconscious body counts as meeting.The first time she met Bruce Banner, she lured him into a trap and pointed a gun at his face, and he trusted her anyways.As she plummets off a cliff on Vormir, Natasha has some final thoughts about her team.
Relationships: Bruce Banner & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Mentioned Clint Barton/Laura Barton, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov, referenced Natasha Romanov/Bruce Banner
Comments: 9
Kudos: 42





	Tell My Family I Love Them

**Author's Note:**

> This has been in my head for almost a year but I finally put the finishing touches on it. Hope you enjoy!

_I love you._

Three words of death for a Black Widow. Words she heard from her victims sometimes, just before their death. Dmitry Kusnetsov. Ivan Petrovich. Drakov’s daughter. Words that, if ever spoken during her time in the Room, would have meant hers.

_Love is for children._ Children like Cooper and Lila and Nathaniel and Morgan. But not Clint. He’s not a child and neither is she. But, it’s why she’s plummeting off a cliff for him right now, isn’t it?

He knows.

He must know.

All of them.

Still, Natasha wishes she’d had a chance to say it before the end.

* * *

The first time she met Tony Stark, he was an ass and she was eye candy. The CEO and the secretary. The man in power and the woman in a tight-fitting blouse. In a post-Anita Hill, post-Monica Lewinski, post- _Spotlight_ sort of way, of course. All things considered, Tony Stark wasn’t too bad. Certainly less inappropriate than many of her other marks in the past, and she got the sense that he would be even if the venerable Pepper Potts weren’t keeping him on his toes.

Then again, if men were more respectful, she would’ve had a harder time doing her job.

So she put on a show for him—stood out in the way she does best. Happy Hogan down for the count. Tony Stark’s fingerprint captured. He wanted her, as they all did eventually…if not in the usual way.

She solved his dying problem, or rather allowed him the time and space to solve it himself.

“What would you do,” he asked her, “if this was your last birthday on Earth?”

She thought of Clint. Of a harassed Laura, chasing down the two-year-old menace that was Lila. Of Bobbi, maybe, if she wasn’t on mission. “I would do whatever I wanted, with whoever I wanted to do it with.”

Tony Stark survived, something her marks had been doing more and more now since she joined S.H.I.E.L.D. Unfortunately, that leads to complications. Like having to work with him again. 

Maybe that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Natasha knows very well it isn’t.

* * *

The first time she met Steve Rogers, he was out cold, if standing over a man’s unconscious body counts as meeting. He was bigger than she expected, even for a man larger than life.

When she met him for real, she wasn’t all that impressed. He could throw a punch. And throw a metal disc across a room. So could she, if someone gave her one. And then there was that 1940s sensibility coupled with a certain naivété. His tactical mind wasn’t bad…for leading soldiers into battlefield. Not spies. Her first impression was that he had a lot to learn if he was going to be of any real use to S.H.I.E.L.D.

But learn he did. And by the time of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s fall, it occurred to her that maybe this was when she really _met_ Steve Rogers. His naïveté was still naïveté, but coming from a place of idealism, not an unwillingness to accept the changes of the twenty-first century. It did not stop him from understanding the level of evil a person was capable of, and definitely not from acting on it. And the all-American genuineness that struck her as so off-putting in the beginning was actually genuine, a rarity in this world. And it was loyalty and determination and a penchant for doing absolute good not just one time but every time, something Natasha knew she would never master. That kind of black-and-white thinking didn’t work well for a spy, and certainly not an assassin, but it did in an ally. Someone to call when things went south. Natasha could always use another one of those.

_Not a friend,_ she promised herself at the time. _Wrong business for that._

* * *

The first time she met Bruce Banner, she lured him into a trap and pointed a gun at his face, and he trusted her anyways. Well, not _trusted_ , perhaps, but certainly more than she did him. She did not trust whatever semblance of control he had, because she knew what it was like to have none either, and how desperately one without control pretends to have it.

Beyond a few ghosts in her past and, later, Loki’s scepter, nothing spooked her as viscerally as the prospect of fighting the Hulk. Her entire arsenal—stun bracelets, handguns, seduction tactics, the years of combat techniques drilled into her very bones—was ineffective against the threat. She could run, dodge, defend for a few moments if she was lucky, but she couldn’t fight that kind of raw strength.

_This is monsters and magic and nothing we were ever trained for._

So Natasha did what she did best and adapted. After New York, she volunteered to work with him on taming the Hulk—another skill to add to her arsenal, a weakness to repair within herself. But in doing so, she also got to know the quiet, unassuming scientist underneath. Bruce was quiet where the Hulk was loud, and sweet where the Hulk was all rage and destruction. Her consideration of something…more…with him was fleeting but sincere, but not just because he disappeared. In the aftermath of a trip back to the Red Room, of feeling the burning sensation in her toes for the eleventh hour of pirouettes and the first gush of warm blood against her fingers and hands forcing her legs apart, running away with him was simple and easy and seemed a solution to all of her problems.

“I had a dream,” she told Bruce, because beyond Clint he was the only one who would understand. “The kind that seems normal at the time, but when you wake… I dreamed that I was an Avenger. That I was more than the assassin they made me.”

When Wanda’s influence faded, and her mind was her own again, it didn’t change the fact that it was a dream. But it was one she knew she had to hold onto, because she knew what Clint knew—

There was a certain amount of red that could never be wiped out, and that was a debt she would spend the rest of her life paying.

It didn’t make Bruce’s departure sting any less.

* * *

The first time she met Clint, it was bullets fired and shots not taken, mercy and confusion and hate. Then it was playing whack-a-mole with the monsters in her head, training and programming so deeply intertwined she feared they were one in the same. It was trustless hours and sleepless nights, over and over again.

Eventually, it was hope. Striving for something better, something bigger than herself and her next mission. Her next mark. It was Clint worming his way into her life, into her mind and heart, promising that even if she couldn’t _be_ good, even if that door was forever closed to her, she could still _do_ good. And that doing good was worth something.

That she was worth something.

Clint was her partner, through the injuries and the mistakes and the hell that was Budapest. She was his through the same.

Somewhere in there, trust was given, and earned.

Somewhere in there, she had met Laura, had watched his kids grow up. Somewhere in there, she got the privilege of being Auntie Nat.

It didn’t make Drakov’s daughter and all the other children whose lives she’d ruined hurt any less. It wasn’t forgiveness. But it was acceptance. It was moving past. It was a place to belong, when she had no place in this world.

Clint had saved her in more ways than one, and no matter how many times she saved his life or dragged his unconscious body out of hell, it would always be what bound them together. She had understood everything about the world, before she met him. She’d understood its cracks and imperfections and exploited them all. Clint had taken her worldview and widened it, offering her a hand up and a choice out of the pit she hadn’t even known she’d been living in.

In the end—because this _is_ the end, she knows—his choice counts for something. _Their_ choice counts for something.

* * *

Her team and her family are her last thoughts when she hits the bottom.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [It's An Old Song (And This Is How It Ends)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26606803) by [sadtunes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadtunes/pseuds/sadtunes)




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